Distributed Coverage Control with Mobile Robots: A Potential Game Approach

Abstract

The use of mobile robots in industrial applications has led to a demand for autonomous multi-robot systems with robust and distributed algorithms. A critical objective in such systems is coverage control, where a team of mobile robots need to respond to spatiotemporal events in a bounded region. Here, we address a specific coverage problem, where a group of mobile robots are tasked with responding to events by covering specific locations on two sides of a linear workstation. We formulate the problem as a game played by the mobile robots with well-designed player strategies, and we demonstrate that the resulting framework is a potential game based on equally shared utilities among the robots. The proposed framework is distributed and decentralized, allowing for anonymous identities and constrained sensing capabilities in the robots. A set of simulation studies verify our approach.